EVERY TIME LILY looked at Jack Perry, she wished he were dead.
It was, admittedly, a harsh reaction to have to a pleasant young man: handsome, devout, the son of a respectable merchant. But Lily could not clap eyes on him without picturing his body in the mud of a French battlefield, torn and broken, his lifeless eyes staring up at her.
It was wrong that Jack was alive and Charley dead. She thought it before Jack left for the Front and she thought it, too, when he came home, strapping and healthy. If Jack had been brave, he would have signed up with Charley, and been at Monchy-le-Preux, and taken Charley’s death.
But now he and Grace were keeping company, and Lily had another reason to wish him dead. It would have been fine—ideal, in fact—if he and Grace had been sweethearts before the war. He could have gone off to war, and Grace could have written him letters, and then when he died, Grace’s heart would have been broken.
In Lily’s imagined life, she and Grace sat together for hours in the parlour or on the front porch of the house on warm days, content to knit and embroider in each other’s company. In that life, a dead soldier lover would fit perfectly. She did not wish Grace to live entirely without love; a little girlhood romance added colour to life, if only it ended with the girl’s innocence intact and a bittersweet memory to cherish.
It was a pretty picture, Grace safe and contented at her mother’s side, dreaming about her brave lover who gave his life for his country. Lily could not shake her resentment of Jack for surviving to shatter that image, though she felt wicked knowing that she was wishing poor Elizabeth Perry the same anguish she herself had known. But then, Mrs. Perry had three more sons.
The Catalina station was busy this June morning. Even Mr. Coaker himself was there, to greet his daughter Camilla, he told the Reverend as they waited for the train. Now there’s a good girl! Lily thought. Coaker and his wife had been separated for years and the girl lived with Mrs. Coaker: she was about Grace’s age and entirely devoted to her mother, though she came for a few weeks each summer to visit her father in Port Union. It was shameful, of course, that the Coakers lived separately—a bad example to the people, and one reason Lily refused to join in her husband’s admiration of Coaker. People whispered that the great reformer was so cruel to his wife that she could not live under his roof. But the girl was a model daughter, and when Lily had seen Camilla with Mrs. Coaker in St. John’s she felt a pang of envy. Imagine having a daughter whose only ambition was to stay by her mother’s side!
Now the train was here, and there was Miss Coaker, and Abe Russell with his new wife, and a knot of other people, and then Grace and Jack. As soon as Jack stepped off the train and reached back to give his hand to Grace, Lily saw that something was wrong with him. Nothing as wrong as what was wrong with Charley. Nothing as irreparable as death. But the boy who had carried a sort of golden sheen on him ever since returning from the war looked tarnished now.
When Jack and Grace were home last summer, there had been an ease to their laughter, a confidence. As if, despite the fact that one of them had been through a war and another had lost her brother in that war, they still walked through the world with the belief that all would be well, that oceans would part at their feet. Such confidence in Grace had frightened Lily: no girl should go out into the world with her head held so high. A girl should go out guarded, watchful for a thousand dangers or, better yet, not go out into the world at all, but stay safe at her mother’s side. And clearly Grace had caught a hint of those dangers, for both she and Jack seemed guarded, the sunny light of their faces shadowed as they came down from the train.
There was a moment, before the two families parted ways at the station, when Grace and Jack stood very close gripping each other’s hands. She said something to him in a low voice, her forehead crinkled as it had done when she was very serious ever since she was a tiny girl. Jack shook his head, and then Grace pulled away to go with Lily and the Reverend back to the manse, and Jack went off with his parents.
Lily had no words to ask Grace what had happened. Nor would she ask about Abigail Hayward, even after Grace settled her bags around her feet in the carriage and said, “Mrs. Parker sends her love, Mother, and still wishes you would come for a visit.”
“Abigail Parker knows very well New York is the last place on earth I’d want to go for a visit. If I had any interest in gadding about.”
After supper the Reverend excused himself to visit an ailing parishioner. Lily was about to go into the parlour when Grace said, “It’s a lovely evening, I’m going to sit out on the verandah.”
“Very well.”
At the door she turned back. “Come out and sit with me, Mother?” She sounded hesitant as a schoolboy asking a girl to his first dance.
“The flies will have you eaten alive,” Lily said.
“I don’t mind. I’ve missed the fresh air and the view.”
“Suit yourself.” Then, as the door closed behind Grace, Lily went into the parlour to pick up her work bag. She took the set of table napkins she was embroidering—a wedding gift for a friend’s daughter—out on the verandah and pulled up the straight-backed chair across from the rocker where Grace was lounging. The evening air was pleasant, still holding a trace of the day’s warmth.
“See? It’s lovely out,” Grace said, swatting at a fly that buzzed near her nose.
“The insects will get worse as it gets dark.”
“If they start bothering me, I’ll go inside.”
They sat silently for a while as Lily picked away at her embroidery and Grace stared out at the harbour. “Don’t you have any sewing or knitting?” Lily asked.
“Nothing unpacked yet. Can’t I have a few minutes just to sit and enjoy a lovely evening? I don’t have to be doing something all the time, do I?”
There now, Grace had her back up already, and the subject of Jack Perry had not even been broached. Truly, there was nothing Lily could say to the girl, nothing at all. It had always been like this—Grace took offense so easily. But Lily knew she must not stop trying. Considering and discarding several possibilities, she finally put together a sentence that might get near the information she wanted without angering Grace too much. She practiced it several times in her head before she spoke.
“Will Jack be coming to speak to your father while he’s in town?”
Grace said nothing for a moment, then, without meeting her mother’s eyes, she said, “I don’t know. I wouldn’t imagine so.”
Lily had hit somewhere close to the mark. Something must have gone wrong between the lovebirds.
“Oh. I suppose since you both still have another year of school…”
She let the sentence trail off, but this suggestion of delay in their engagement seemed to trouble Grace even more. She hopped out of the rocker and went and leaned out over the railing. “Careful,” Lily said—not that there was any real danger of Grace overbalancing and tumbling into the rhododendron bush, but it was a habit as accustomed as breathing, to warn her of possible danger. In another habit just as ancient, Grace responded by leaning out further, ’til only the tips of her shoes grazed the porch.
“Exactly,” she said finally. “I’ve got another year of college; plenty of time to talk about the future when that’s done.” Grace had already secured a job at the FPU offices for the summer.
“So you’re still determined to go back in September, are you?”
“I suppose so.” Grace shrugged.
“And what will you do after that? Does it really make sense to spend two years and hundreds of dollars getting a diploma if you’re going to get married as soon as you finish?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Mother! Stop badgering me, will you?”
Lily swatted her embroidery at a whining buzz in the air near her head. She gathered her work back into her bag. “I knew those flies would have me tormented,” she said. “And it’s getting chilly. Put on a sweater if you’re staying out here.” She stood up and went inside.
In church the next morning Jack sat with his parents and Grace sat next to Lily as the Reverend expounded upon the good and faithful servant who would enter into the joy of his Lord. Jack walked Grace home from church, but Lily got no hint as to the reason for the strain in the air until Monday night when the Ladies’ Aid met at Mrs. Perry’s home.
Grace said she wasn’t going. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lily said. “Everyone round the harbour knows you’re keeping company with her son. It will look bad if you don’t go.”
“I don’t care how it looks.”
“That’s all very well for you, but I’ll be plagued with questions. People will think that you and Jack have had a falling-out. Worse yet, they’ll think you’re on bad terms with his mother.”
“I don’t mind what they think! Can’t you just tell them I’ve gone to bed with a headache? I’ll go to bed, then it’ll be half true.”
“I’m not in the habit of telling lies, or half-truths,” said Lily.
“Oh, aren’t you?” Grace said. A queer smile lifted the corners of her lips and she went to get her sweater. “I suppose I’d better come, after all.”
As Lily had suspected, Grace was the centre of an eager group, not just of the girls her own age but their mothers too, all eager to know about her time in New York, even if most of them were more interested in New York fashions than in social work. Midway through the evening, Lily overheard Mrs. Snelgrove ask Mrs. Perry, “So, will young Jack be working for his father this summer, until he goes back to college?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Perry said, and laid down the cup of tea she was holding. “Truly, Clara, I don’t know what to make of that boy. He tells me now he may not—” she looked around and lowered her voice, but not so much that Lily, positioned a little behind her, could not hear “—he may not even go back to school. Imagine! He’s always been so good, so hard working, and now, well—I don’t know what to make of him. His father’s very upset, and—oh, I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t.”
Once again, Mrs. Perry glanced around as if to make sure no one overheard, but this time she looked behind her. Lily dropped her eyes to her needlework, but not before she met Mrs. Perry’s eyes for one unguarded second.
Later, with the younger women out talking in groups on the lawn in the twilight, Mrs. Perry glided up to Lily in the parlour. Most of the women were gone now. Mrs. Perry’s maid came and went with teacups and trays.
“You overheard me talking to Mrs. Snelgrove about poor Jack,” Mrs. Perry said. “I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong to talk outside the house—I never do it—but I can talk to you, can’t I, Lily dear? We’re almost family, aren’t we? Poor Grace must be distracted. Did she tell you the whole story?”
Lily’s tongue was stilled by the easy assumption of confidences between mother and daughter. Elizabeth Perry had three daughters in addition to her fine handsome sons: did they all confide in their mother all the secrets and sorrows of their little love affairs, their private lives? Two of the girls were married now, of course, yet they were in and out of their mother’s house all the time with an easy intimacy Lily could not help but envy.
“Grace doesn’t say too much,” she admitted finally.
“Oh, she’s very discreet, I should be more like her myself. But the truth is it’s broken my heart, and to hear Zeke losing his temper over all the money we’ve spent on his education, and poor Jack just sits there and takes it, like a dog that’s been beaten—that’s not my boy, not at all. I don’t recognize him.” She pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her blouse and dabbed her eyes. “When he came home from overseas I was so glad, I thought God had spared us, and I thought I’d never ask for anything again. But now, to see him come back all—all defeated like, as if his spirit’s broken. Even the war didn’t do that to him!”
Or perhaps it did. For half a moment Lily allowed herself to feel sympathy.
But she could harden her heart as easily as Pharaoh. She almost felt it hardening, like putting on armour inside her rib cage. “At least he came back,” she said. “Whatever happens to him, he is alive. You should be grateful.”
“Of course, of course,” sniffled Mrs. Perry, “and we are, but…” She broke off, her head lifting to the sound of a male tread on the stairs. Her husband and son had been banished during the women’s meeting; Lily had thought they were gone out but Jack, at least, must have been upstairs. Now he came and stood in the doorway and took in his crying mother and the woman who might be, might have been, his mother-in-law. He looked haggard. That was the only word for it.
“Mother…Mrs. Collins,” he said. “I’m sorry, I thought all the ladies were gone.”
Elizabeth crossed the room to him, took hold of his arms and laid her head against his chest. Jack looked over her head at Lily, embarrassment covering over the terrible weariness in his face. “Is Grace still here?”
“I believe she’s out in the garden.”
Jack looked through the window but made no move to go. He let his mother cry against his shirt-front as Lily excused herself and made her way out of the Perrys’ house.